


The New Colossus

by h0ldthiscat



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-03
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-05-04 18:43:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5344553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/h0ldthiscat/pseuds/h0ldthiscat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s always seemed to attract people looking for answers, a Lady Liberty lifting her lamp for all the troubled souls in the world; give me your exhausted, your passionate, your frenzied dreamers out to save the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The New Colossus

“Dr. Scully, do you have a second?”

She looks up from a patient’s chart and sees Miranda Holcombe, the cardio fellow, tuck a piece of hair behind her ear. 

“Sure,” Scully answers with a warm smile, closing the chart. “Shoot.”

“Um, it’s actually kind of… can we go in here?” The young doctor gestures to an on-call room just down the hall.

Scully follows, furrowing her brow. “Sure, what’s up?”

Miranda closes the door, presses the backs of her hands to her round cheeks. “This is, um… kind of tough.”

“Of course, take your time.” Young doctors come to her a lot with medical dilemmas, ethical dilemmas, crises of faith. She’s always seemed to attract people looking for answers, a Lady Liberty lifting her lamp for all the troubled souls in the world; give me your exhausted, your passionate, your frenzied dreamers out to save the world. 

_And I’ll wreck them,_ she thinks bitterly.

“Okay.” The girl--she’s not really a girl, Scully rationalizes, she’s past 30--nods, stuffs her hands in the pockets of her lab coat. “I haven’t been working here very long but I really like it, and I really like working with you.”

Scully smiles, not showing her teeth but letting it reach her eyes. “Thank you.”

The younger woman takes a deep breath and goes on, her sentences tripping over themselves in their rush to get out. “And… I checked the OR board and I noticed you don’t have any surgeries tomorrow night and--I’m on call but there are a lot of nice restaurants right downtown and I could get back really quickly if they needed me. Especially with Uber and everything, I mean, like, you barely even need a car anymore, um.” She clears her throat loudly and squeezes her eyes shut. “Dana, if you would be up for it, I’d really like to, um. Take you to dinner.”

“Oh.” She blinks a few times. “Miranda.” She feels her cheeks turning red and looks down at her shoes. She doesn’t usually feel short these days. She feels short now. “I’m actually not dating right now, anyone. It’s not because you’re--I mean I have, in the past--I’ve--um--I’m just not in a, uh, place, right now…”

Miranda nods, waves a hand, cuts her off. “Of course. I shouldn’t have--”

“No, no, you absolutely should have, I’m glad you did,” Scully says, suddenly able to form complete sentences again. “And it’s not--it’s not you, you’re smart, and a very beautiful woman but I have--” She cuts herself off. What does she have? She’s a fifty-one year old doctor with a month-to-month lease and a bed that sags on the left hand side. 

“You don’t need to say anything, Dr. Scully,” Miranda says, her hand already on the door handle. “I didn’t mean to overstep.”

“Miranda. Really. It’s okay.”

The woman just smiles and shuts the door behind her. Scully stands there for a moment in stunned silence. A few days later, when she’s having coffee with Mulder, she mentions it, sort of without thinking.

“Something happened at work the other day,” she says, stealing a bite of his croissant, “and I’m not really sure what to make of it.”

“Shoot,” he says. He sips his coffee too quickly and burns his tongue. 

“I sort of got… asked out by a coworker of mine.”

If he’s annoyed he doesn’t show it. “What did he say?”

“She.”

“Oh.” He only raises his eyebrows.

“Don’t say anything crass.”

“I wasn’t going to. What did you say?”

“I told her I wasn’t really dating right now.”

“Aren’t you?” He smirks. 

It’s her turn to quirk an eyebrow. “I don’t know, am I?” 

There is a comfortable silence between them as he considers this. She does too. They’ve been living apart for nearly a year now, but have been seeing each other weekly for nearly half the time. Just checking in, she’d told herself the first time she’d shown up at the house they used to share in the middle of the night and pressed herself against him in the doorway. Every now and then they grab lunch, coffee, a quick dinner. Every now and then she spends the night.

“I think maybe you are,” he says after a minute. “I think maybe we are.”

“Well good, because I just turned down a very beautiful woman for you.”

“I would say the same to you, but no one quite measures up.”

“Smooth, Mulder.”

“You have to admire her courage,” he says, flicking a seed off the top of Scully’s bran muffin. “It’s not easy.”

“Admitting your feelings for someone?” She chuckles. “Hello pot, have you met kettle?”

“I was speaking from experience, not from judgment.” 

“Why did we wait so long?” she asks quietly, looking at her lap, feeling very exposed all of a sudden. They are at their own small table in the coffee shop but she feels like she’s at the center of a carousel that’s turning much too quickly.

“I don’t know,” he says, simultaneously looking much older and the exact same age he was on the day they met. “I don’t know.”

After a moment she reaches across the table and takes his hand. Twenty minutes later when they finish their coffee she still has not let go.


End file.
